Once the Yama Sakura portion of the trip ended I traveled by train back towards Tokyo and Tachikawa, one of the suburban areas of Tokyo. On a Sunday, my birthday, I took the Tama Monorail to the Tama Zoological Park and spent about three hours just roaming and looking at the few animals that were in the park. The day was cold and cloudy, not the best time of year to go and see the park. But I went because I felt it was better than staying in the hotel, or walking around the train station and its stores.

I went to all the major sections of the park, and found all of them interesting. But of all the animals I saw I like the bigger animals the best.

To me the most thrilling thing to see were the running young giraffes in the African section of the park. Tama is very big, and it appears they’re trying to give the animals as much natural space as possible. While I was there I noticed hey were working on a large section, which I can only assume will expand the park space even more.

These are, in no particular order, three photos out of hundreds I took while in Osaka. I didn’t have a lot of personal time to explore until the very last day. So I wondered about in a random fashion close to the hotel I was staying at, grabbing images that had a certain appeal to me, such as this businessman coming down these red stairs. It was the composition and colors, and the one lone human in the frame.

This photo shows the bare sinews that bind a city together: power and communications. You need power in a modern city before anything happens, starting with communications, and continuing on to light, heat, the movement of water and other human activities. Even when it’s exposed like it is in every Japanese city I’ve visited so far, it’s totally ignored, just part of the background. Yet, if it didn’t exist, neither would this city, or any modern city for that matter. Even cities that go back centuries, to far earlier historical eras, now have these sinews.

And then there are this odd little corners with human-designed and crafted artifacts that catch the eye and the imagination. I thought about moving the cigarette receptacle out of the image, but left it in because smoking is such a part of Japanese culture. The other four are meant to hold cuttings or living plants. Four support life, one supports the human activity that leads to an early grave.